Sylvanna M. Falcón, Founder and Director
Associate Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies
Sylvanna Falcón is an award-winning author and educator, and a former United Nations consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. She is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations, (University of Washington Press, 2016) which won the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association, and Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú: Contesting Tiers of Citizenship. University of Illinois Press, 2024).
She is the co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship [Rutgers University Press, 2021] and New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights [Routledge, 2011]. She has an upcoming book in Spanish titled “Voces de Mujeres Feministas Agentes de Cambio en Perú (Voices of Feminist Women Changemakers in Perú).
Professor Falcón is the recipient of the 2020 Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching in the Division of Social Sciences at UC Santa Cruz and is the founder and director of UC Santa Cruz Human Rights Digital Investigations Lab.
Monica Estrada Arias, Digital Human Rights Researcher
Monica Estrada Arias, an alum of the Human Rights Investigations Lab at UC Santa Cruz, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Legal Studies in 2020.
Her work as a student in the Lab included a series of reports on the massive anti-government demonstrations in Chile in 2019 and additional research assistance for other Latin American human rights crises.
After graduating from UC Santa Cruz, Monica became a research manager at a non-profit where she led a team of researchers focusing on Spanish language misinformation.
She has published multiple articles documenting the spread of political misinformation on social media and radio aimed at the Latinx community.
Her research interests are in interdisciplinary approaches to human rights, Latin American studies, media studies, and tech ethics.
Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Lab Advisor
Research Program Manager at The Humanities Institute
Dr. Nauenberg Dunkell is a humanistic social scientist with research specializations in transitional justice, global and transnational sociology, and peace negotiations in Colombia.
Before moving to UC Santa Cruz, she was an inaugural research affiliate at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law and National Science Foundation fellow at the Center for Conflict, Displacement, and Peacebuilding at the University of Cartagena, Colombia.
Alongside her scholarship, she has led Global Youth Connect’s Colombia Human Rights Delegation, worked at the International Peace and Security Institute’s The Hague Symposium on Post-Conflict Transitions and International Justice, and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Kingdom of Tonga.
She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2018.